Honourable Mention

Remember when the socialite, heiress and terrible actress got all confused at the death of Nelson Mandela?

So does half the world, but as she has pointed out with great fury since then, she actually did nothing of the sort. The offending Tweet above was the creation of Twitter hoaxers, but that didn’t stop everyone, including news outlets, falling over themselves to proclaim her an idiot. Shame on them.

Unfortunately for Miss Hilton, some muck sticks, and she’s been forced to come out with an official rebuttal via her real account, which will no doubt completely pass by a still considerable portion of commenters who will invariably cherish every morsel that destroys the image of their idols over the actual truth.

10. Tesco

Not every Tesco account can be as good as the Tesco Mobile team, who delight in responding to customers with criticisms of their product and service with pithy, delighted comments.

The company was rocked badly by the horse meat crisis, which revealed that a horrible number of processed meals in supermarkets in the UK contained meat that wasn’t actually supposed to be in there.

Despite eating donner kebabs as a staple of weekend cuisine (which probably contains a lot worse than horse meat, which is perfectly edible,) the nation – and indeed the rest of Europe – was outraged by the appearance of horse in their food chain, and the lack of appropriate labelling.

Tesco’s Twitter account meanwhile either spectacularly failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation with their horsey pun (which probably became the 8th billion jokes along the same lines to appear on Twitter in those dark days) or they genuinely didn’t realise their unfortunate turn of phrase would be taken as it was.

Given the irreverent brilliance of the Tesco Mobile account, you have to suspect it was intentional. Perhaps not smart, but still intended.

9. JP Morgan

Everyone hates bankers these days, to the extent that it appears they may have overtaken politicians as the most hated group of over-paid people who attract the open venom of the normal everyday working man.

Not all bankers however appear to be aware of their public image, and expect open invitations to engage on social media to be wonderful exchanges of good will and enlightened debate.

JP Morgan clearly fall into the latter category, having set up a live Twitter Q&A with Vice Chairman Jimmy Lee, where everyone could have their say to the supremo.

Sadly for the brand, that’s exactly what Twitter did, ignoring the fact that JP Morgan were looking for a PR boost, and ripping the company to shreds in a ceaseless and hilariously effective hate campaign – including by respected journalists – that almost immediately led to the cancellation of the Q&A session, after seven long hours of viscious tweet responses.

8. Penis Pollen – Benadryl

There are several rules of the internet. One is that no matter what you write on, or how well you write it, you will always find a whole-heartedly committed troll who will spectacularly misread or misunderstand, and embark on a furious campaign of hatred against you, and another is that every argument on any forum will inevitably boil down to Hitler.

The other, lesser expressed rules of the internet are often the most entertaining, such as the revelation that should come as a shock to precisely noone that if you open up anything official to external editing (like Wikipedia) you are essentially doing nothing more than giving someone licence to draw a penis on it, or write something hilariously defamatory.

So Benadryl found out when they created an interactive pollen hotspot map, and invited sneezy users to track where the worst spots were for pollen. Naturally someone (these guys) decided to abuse the system, and draw an ejaculating penis using the handy icons. There is clearly nothing moderate about that member.

They also invited their readers to do similar things, and the results were occasionally spectacular…

7. Pepsi Hates Ronaldo

A little sporting competition is to be encouraged, and rivalry is often healthy, especially for the spirit of big competitions, but Pepsi Sweden took it a little far with their targeted campaign ahead of a key World Cup qualifier against Portugal, which featured an effigy of Cristiano Ronaldo on a train track, with its head crushed, and full of pins.

Regardless of the comic impact of the campaign, fans weren’t exactly pleased. Clearly – and justifiably – outraged by the portrayal of the death and torture of their idol, more than 40,000 Portuguese supporters took to Facebook to become part of a group called “Never drink Pepsi again.”

Ironically, Ronaldo pretty much single-handedly ensured his side beat the Swedes by scoring a hat-trick in the crucial game. Concrete proof once and for all that Voodoo doesn’t even work.

6. Ryan Air

Whatever you do, don’t let the boss loose on Twitter, especially when you work for Ryanair and your boss is CEO Michael O’Leary, who clearly wasn’t briefed on the normal etiquette of Twitter Q&As.

O’Leary spent the planned Q&A session ostracising female passengers with some hilariously outrageous sexist comments and casual flirting, as well as forgetting to tag his own tweets with the #GrillMOL hashtag, before displaying frankly uncharacteristic self-awareness in evaluating Ryanair’s biggest mistakes…

Quite why any company thinks that the CEO is the right person to interact with customers is baffling considering how removed the upper echelons of management and directors tend to be from clients, and O’Leary did nothing more than highlight exactly how much of a silly ideas the whole PR stunt was.

5. Kitchen Aid Joke About Death

Someone very obviously got sacked for using the death of Barrack Obama’s grandmother as the foundation for an ill-timed and offensive joke about the presidential debates from 2012.

Whether or not they intended to Tweet from the company account (doubtful,) the joker brought a huge tide of ill-will to the account and brand through the idiotic slip, even if the frank and open apology helped appease some.

It’s not a smart move to insult anyone’s dead family members, but when they’re the most powerful man in the world, you’re not likely to emerge well from the situation.

But hey, at least they didn’t use the death of a beloved pop music icon to get some Likes…

If anyone invites you to Like something to end Cancer or World Hunger, or to show that you care, with the inevitable caveat that failure to press a button will confirm that you’re just about the worst person in the world, you should remove them from your Facebook friends list immediately.

These people should be neither encouraged or tolerated, and that goes doubly when the poster of the offending status is as big a brand as MSN.

4. Amy’s Baking Company’s Spectacular Breakdown

Public rants are part and parcel of the social media landscape, and while it’s a regular occurrence to see family members or old school friends decrying how awful their life is, or how they’ve just had the WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE EVER because someone had the audacity not to give them three free refills of coffee, it’s not often you get to see a whole company implode with rage.

In the wake of a particularly bad showing on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares programme, the owners of Amy’s Baking Company in Scottsdale, Ariz., attempted a PR campaign to respond to what was shown in the episode.

But they didn’t offer reasoned debate, or show how their business had improved since the scenes were filmed – instead they defended themselves by calling a major chunk of the internet, and thus of their potential customer base – expletive riddled names.

The Kitchen Nightmares episode had shown the pair taking staff tips for themselves, starting fights with customers, firing scores of people and serving frozen food, much to Ramsay’s dismay.

The campaign of social media hatred was spectacular and tragic all at once, but luckily Amy’s had a trump card, claiming that they’d been hacked, and the FBI were on the case. Obviously…

3. Underage Major Fail – Spearmint Rhino

If you’re running a strip club, you probably shouldn’t have images of children anywhere near your marketing campaigns. You shouldn’t even make jokes that allude to children.

You’d think that was a pretty reasonable pair of rules, and ones that shouldn’t even need explicitly mentioning. But you’d be wrong, as proved by the outrageously stupid decision by Spearmint Rhino’s Melbourne team who decided to take to their Facebook page for a bit of a light-hearted quiz.

There are any number of things wrong with the offending post – for instance the suggestion that a baby is behaving like a stripper, or the particularly worrying implication that someone thought it was appropriate to show a baby picture of someone employed in an adult industry for cute reactions – but the most spectacularly outrageous element was that the timestamp shown on the image suggested that the future stripper was the ripe old age of 14.

So, that means either Spearmint Rhino are employing underage strippers, or they’ve taken a picture of a stranger’s child and implied that they are now a stripper.

2. More Death Jokes – Luton Airport

When is the right time to use a photo of a plane crash for LOLs?

Never. And if you answered anything else, there’s either something wrong with you, or you used to work for the social media team behind Luton Airport’s biggest fail.

Back in March, the team decided to post a light-hearted weather-based joke to make sure their devoted followers and customers knew they would be safe from dangerous weather conditions, featuring a shot of a silly airplane that had obviously suffered from precisely that fate.

Incredibly, the Luton team didn’t bother to look up the source of the image that they were joking about, and just assumed that it was a minor incident, when in fact the crash had resulted in the death of a six-year-old child at Chicago Midway Airport in 2005. Needless to say, Facebook users were outraged, and aired their outrage, prompting Luton Airport to show atypical awareness and remove the image entirely.

1. Casual Racism – Home Depot

There’s one quick way to outrage pretty much everyone who sees your Tweets, as well as inviting criminal prosecution against you: racism.

The Home Depot’s College Game Day campaign may not have been intended to shock or offend, but the spectacular lack of awareness in the combination of the picture above and the “spot the difference” style Tweet caption qualifies this as easily the biggest social media misstep of recent memory.

It didn’t last very long, but the response to the offending post was swift and furious, and the company were forced into an immediate response, removing the tweet. But the damage was done, and Twitter users were left amazed that anyone could be stupid enough not to think about how the image could be misconstrued.

Naturally, Home Depot sacked the individual and the agency involved, who are no doubt still out there terrorising the social media universe with horribly ill-conceived campaigns.

Did we miss any spectacular social media fails that deserve mention here? Share your own picks below!